Solitons

Interactions between photons arise due to the presence of optical nonlinearities. In topological Thouless pumps, a sufficiently strong nonlinearity leads to soliton transport with a fractionally quantized plateau structure—reminiscent of transport in the fractional quantum Hall effect.

High-repetition rate microresonator-based frequency combs offer powerful and compact optical frequency comb sources that are of great importance to various applications. Here, the authors extend the tunability of the Kerr soliton frequency combs by exploiting thermal effects and frequency stabilization techniques.

A novel class of solitons, which builds up in spectrally confined optical cavities when dispersion is practically absent, is revealed both theoretically and experimentally, opening new avenues for generating soliton pulses and frequency combs endowed with unprecedented temporal and spectral features.

In topological physics, the bulk-boundary correspondence is of great interest in both Hermitian and non-Hermitian systems. This work unveils a similar universal modulation instability-rogue wave correspondence in integrable models, which may offer a way of better understanding the physics of nonlinear waves as well as of obtaining exact rogue wave solutions.

The combination of nonlinearity and topology has recently attracted significant attention in the field of optical physics. This work considers a photonic Chern insulator in the nonlinear regime and explores the properties of topological bulk solitons holding the stability and robustness, which contributes to the field of nonlinear topological photonics and provides further physical understandings towards other photonic topological insulators with nonlinearity.